As one of the fastest growing economies globally, India is taking huge strides in advancing the harmonization of emissions reporting. This transition has been accompanied by a growing demand for clear and practical guidance for the financial industry. In response, PCAF launched its India chapter in September of 2025, which has grown to 15 signatories and serves as a platform for capacity building, peer learning, and collaborating on solutions related to measuring and reporting emissions associated with financial activities.
Across conversations with Indian financial institutions, non-banking financial companies, and other stakeholders, there has been strong interest in moving beyond high-level principles of the PCAF Standard towards is practical implementation in the Indian context. In particular, stakeholders are looking for support on operationalization aspects, including data collection, portfolio coverage, and internal benchmarking. These conversations led to the establishment of the PCAF India Accelerator.
The PCAF India Accelerator is designed as a hands‑on capacity‑building platform to support financial institutions in measuring and disclosing emissions associated with financial activities, while strengthening practical understanding of the PCAF Standard and its application in the Indian context.
PCAF India hosts these workshop-style sessions on a quarterly basis, with the objective of moving beyond awareness to enable implementation. The programme combines detailed walkthroughs of the PCAF Standard, guided calculation examples, interactive group exercises and real‑world case studies. This structured approach supports participants in translating theory into practice and building internal capabilities to measure and manage emissions associated with financial activities effectively.
To learn more about the Accelerator sessions, please read the individual excerpts below. As the PCAF India team hosts additional sessions, more excerpts will be included.
If you would like to join the Accelerator Sessions and/or have any questions, please contact us via info@carbonaccountingfinancials.com.
PCAF India organized the inaugural Accelerator session, hosted by IDFC First Bank in Mumbai on 27 March 2026. The discussions went well beyond methodology walkthroughs, where over 60 participants actively engaged in a technical deep dive and on hands practical example on financed emissions calculations for the Business loans, Unlisted Equity and Project finance asset classes of the PCAF Standard. This was followed by an international case study highlighting financed emission analysis envisioning portfolio related climate risks and influencing investment decisions.
The quality of exchange, practical examples shared, and peer‑to‑peer learning stood out and reinforced why this Accelerator format matters. This session clearly reflected the growing readiness among Indian financial institutions to move from awareness to execution while also being open about challenges and learning curves along the way. This signals strong momentum for the India Chapter and for the broader PCAF community.
PCAF India organized its second Accelerator session, hosted by YES BANK in Mumbai on 25 June 2026, with a focused technical deep dive on the buildings asset class, covering Commercial Real Estate and Mortgages. The session, gathering more than 55 participants, included discussions on how financial institutions can estimate emissions associated with financed buildings, including the use of attribution factors, data quality scores, and approaches based on actual building emissions, floor area, or number of buildings, depending on data availability.
The session was further enriched by a signatory case study from Vastu Housing Finance, which shared practical approaches for financed emissions estimation in the Indian housing finance context, including the use of electricity bill data, family-size proxies, emission factors, and attribution-based calculations. This was followed by a hands-on workshop where participants worked through exercise templates, selected appropriate data quality scores based on data availability, and applied formulae to estimate financed emissions across building-related exposures. The quality of participation, practical case study, and workshop-based learning reinforced the value of the Accelerator format in helping Indian financial institutions move from methodology awareness to implementation readiness.
